If you go to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, you had better plan to be brave. Not just
a little brave, but brave enough to try something completely new, even if
you consider yourself an intermediate scaredy cat. Unless you are prepared
for adventure, there is little point coming this far across the Atlantic to
Brokeback Mountain country, where plenty of ski instructors ditch the bobble
for a cowboy hat, and the real McCoys still wear holsters in the grocery
store.
Jackson Hole is a different kind of skiing experience. You are as likely to
learn to dance the Texas Two Step in the Million Dollar Cowboy bar as
perfect your turns. What doesn’t work here is staying in your comfort zone.
Try sitting in that and sooner or later someone with a cowboy hat is going
to come along and tell you to change.
This doesn’t seem to upset children, all of whom took to the Wild West like
kids in a candy store. Because Jackson Hole is billed as one of the most
challenging ski terrains of any resort in the United States (more than half
of its runs are for experts), it is not known as a family destination.
However, it does have a busy children’s ski school, the Kids Ranch, where
nappy-wearing tinies ride the magic carpet lift, while teenagers can join
Steep and Deep day-camps, to learn to ski advanced terrain and backcountry.
For good skiers, this mountain resort, aptly nicknamed the Big One, offers a
1,260m (4,000ft) vertical drop, the longest in the US, and a unique
open-gates boundary policy that gives skiers and snowboarders 1,200ha (3,000
acres) of backcountry to explore. The assumption that children will tag
along anywhere makes a refreshing change from Britain’s health-and-safety
culture, but their skill may not always live up to expectation.
We were due to spend a night with British friends in a special eight-man yurt
at the bottom of Rock Springs Canyon. The lavish tent came complete with its
own yurtmeister, who would be cooking us breakfast of warm burritos.
However, at the time we visited it was accessible to skiers only via a black
diamond run, and while 12-year-old Nancy in our party was plucky enough to
hike up the mountain in snowshoes with her father, Humphrey, my
nine-year-old son, could not face the two-hour challenge. (This winter a new
chairlift offers access to the yurt to intermediate skiers and cuts the
snowshoeing time to an hour.) To his great disappointment – and mine, since
we both had to stay behind – we missed out on playing racing demon and poker
by candlelight and a log-burning stove that reached sauna levels by morning.
To make up for this, we went snow tubing at Snow King Resort in Jackson town
instead. Snow King is popular with the locals for night skiing, and the
large inflatable tyres that skid their way down a specially prepared 200m
run are packed with everyone from families to powder hounds. The heavier you
are, the faster you descend, so speed freaks hold on to each othe's tubes as
they whizz past spectators, whooping and spinning as they go. Queueing to be
dragged up in our doughnuts by a pulley was definitely an out-of-comfort
zone experience for me, and my descent was more of a yell than a yee-hah.
Humphrey was disappointed that we didn’t go even faster and felt riding with
his shrieking mother was too uncool to do again, so we settled for a
hamburger at Billy’s in town.
When a particularly heavy dump of snow added about 25cm (10in) of powder to
the 11m of snow dropped every year in Jackson Hole, I left Humphrey at the
Kids Ranch ski school and decided to ski the backcountry with the help of a
snowcat usually used to groom pistes. First, Shoveller, our guide, gave us
some avalanche safety instructions, which included advice on how to find a
buried skier by stabbing the snow with a pole. “Don’t worry about hitting
the person, I would happily lose an eye if I thought someone was coming to
get me,” he said, matter of factly. I was so scared I only made it into the
snowcat’s cabin because someone pushed me in.
Our descent was terrifying. I fell more than a dozen times, losing skis and
poles, but the powder was like a feather duvet and I learnt to abandon
myself to the mountain.
I may have been way out of my comfort zone, losing my fear of falling, but
Humphrey, a keen skateboarder, wanted to try snowboarding for the first time
with his ten-year-old friend Ned at the Kids Ranch ski school. This was
challenging, too, and a group that started off as eight children dwindled to
just our two boys by the end of the day. Other beginner snowboarders slunk
off early, complaining of sore bottoms or painful wrists, and although much
emphasis was put on safety and helmet-wearing, one sad seven-year-old was
carted off for an X-ray for a fractured arm.
The second day followed a similar pattern, with only Ned and Humphrey left at
lift closure, exchanging high-fives with their instructor, who called them
“awesome rippers, dudes”. No other winter sport weeds out the wannabes from
the will-bes so effectively, and the boys had a true cowboy swagger as they
headed back home. Who would have thought that two southern softies could
teach the Wild West a thing or two about true grit?
Need to know
How to get there: To avoid being delayed by extreme weather, fly
nonstop to Dallas/Fort Worth, then on to Jackson airport with American
Airlines (020-7365 0777, www.aa.com) from
£517 return.
Packages: Ski Dream (0845 2773333, www.skidream.com)
has seven nights at the Parkway Inn, including transfers and flights on
Delta via Atlanta, from £640pp, based on two sharing. Ski Independence (0845
3103030, www.ski-i.com) has seven nights
at the Four Seasons, based on two sharing, including transfers and flights
from Heathrow with United, from £1,166pp. Inghams (020-8780 4433, www.inghams.co.uk)
offers seven nights at the three-star Ranch Inn Hotel, based on four
sharing, with British Airways flights from Gatwick to Dallas, then on to
Jackson with American Airways. The package, including transfers, costs from
£536pp.
